Thesis 74

Everyware must be self-disclosing.

The second principle of ethical development concerns provisions to notify us when we are in the presence of some informatic system, however intangible or imperceptible it otherwise may be.

We've seen that everyware is hard to see for a variety of reasons, some circumstantial and some intentional. Information processing can be embedded in mundane objects, secreted away in architectural surfaces, even diffused into behavior. And as much as this may serve to encalm, it also lends itself to too many scenarios in which personal information, including that of the most intimate sort, can be collected without your awareness, let alone your consent.

Given the degree to which ubiquitous systems will be interconnected, information once collected can easily, even inadvertently, be conveyed to parties unknown, operating outside the immediate context.

This is an unacceptable infringement on your right of self-determination. Simply put, you should know what kinds of information-gathering activities are transpiring in a given place, what specific types of information are being collected, and by whom and for what purpose. Finally, you should be told how and in what ways the information-gathering system at hand is connected to others, even if just as a general notification that the system is part of the global net.

We might express such an imperative like this: Ubiquitous systems must contain provisions for immediate and transparent querying of their ownership, use, and capabilities.

Everyware must, in other words, be self-disclosing. Such disclosures ensure that you are empowered to make informed decisions as to the level of exposure you wish to entertain.

So, for example, if the flooring in eldercare housing is designed to register impacts, it should say so, as well as specifying the threshold of force necessary to trigger an alert. If the flooring does register a fall, what is supposed to happen? If the flooring is connected in some way to a local hospital or ambulance dispatcher, which hospital is it? Even in such an apparently benign implementation of everywareand maybe even especially in such casesthe choices made by designers should always be available for inspection, if not modification.

None of this is to say that users should be confronted with a mire of useless detail. But seamlessness must be an optional mode of presentation, not a mandatory or inescapable one.

Less ominously, though, such disclosures also help us know when otherwise intangible services are available to us. When an otherwise unremarkable object affords some surprising functionality, or when a digital overlay of information about some place exists, we need to have some way of knowing these things that does not itself rely on digital mediation.

Design researcher Timo Arnall has developed a vocabulary of graphic icons that communicate ideas like these: a friendly, human-readable equivalent of the "service discovery layer" in Bluetooth that specifies what devices and services are locally available. Perhaps Arnall's icons could serve as the basis of a more general graphic language for ubiquitous systemsa set of signs that would eventually become as familiar as "information" or "bathroom," conveying vital ideas of the everyware age: "This object has invisible qualities," or "network dead zone."

Whether we use them to protect ourselves from intrusive information collection or to discover all the ways our new technology can be used, provisions for transparent self-disclosure on the part of ubiquitous systems will be of critical importance in helping us find ways to live around and with them. Such knowledge is the basis of any meaningful ability on our part to decide when and to what degree we wish to engage with everyware and when we would prefer not to.